By K.D. Norris
As Kent County, with the rest of Michigan, begins to come out of its “stay-at-home” COVID-19-limiting efforts, the county’s Health Department remains hard at work with efforts to identify and keep track of persons actively infected — and those possibly exposed to the coronavirus.
And a key element in the county’s contact tracing effort is its on-going Contact Tracing Volunteer program.
“It is really important to control the spread of infection, that is our main goal with this … prevention and control of COVID-19 in our community,” Brian Hartl, supervising epidemiologist at the Kent County Health Department, said to WKTV this week.
The Kent County Health Department (KCHD) is currently seeking contact tracing volunteers to work with the department’s staff “mitigating the community spread of the virus and in supporting patients with a suspected or confirmed infection,” according to supplied material.
“We are really looking for someone who is comfortable with talking with people,” Hartl said. “Really, that is our main criteria, the prerequisite, that you feel comfortable talking with people on the phone. I think if you have some sort of science or health care background, where you are comfortable talking about health concerns, or infections, that is an added bonus.”
While volunteers will be asked to use their own home computers and personal phones, they will be give training, including “sensitivity training.”
“Training is obviously necessary, to help them understand what this is all about,” Hartl said. “Anytime you are talking about someone’s health, you have to understand that this in confidential. Sometimes people get concerned with charing their information with a stranger from the health department. And so confidentially is important. Some of these calls can get sensitive, and emotional.”
And always of great help are persons of diverse cultures and languages.
“We are seeing a high burden (of infections) in populations who are non-English speaking here is Kent County,” Hartl said. “So, individuals who are from those populations, who can speak those languages, are of great need at this point and would be an amazing benefit to this endeavor.”
County’s contact and isolation protocol
Hartl also detailed the KCHD’s overall process of “prevention and control of COVID-19” in Kent County.
“When we get a positive case of COVID-19, our investigators will contact that individual by phone to do that interview, an investigation,” Hartl said. “That investigation includes when their symptoms started, what types of symptoms they had, where they may have picked up the virus, if they have an idea. And then we ask a lot of questions about who they came into contact with 48 hour prior to their getting their symptoms, up to the point we are talking to them.
“We want to make sure all the individuals who may have been exposed to the persons who is sick are identified,” he said, adding that the focus of the questions are “high-risk exposures” to the sick individual.
“We get a list of those contacts, and we, in turn, contact them and ask them about their health to see if they have symptoms yet or if they are well. And then we recommend those individuals do a 14-day quarantine period from the last time they were exposed … periodically, our contact tracers call those individuals to make sure they are asymptomatic, and make sure they are still abiding by the quarantine recommendations. On the 14th day … we would release them from that quarantine.”
Hartl said it is also part of the protocol to “contact the (active) patients every couple days, just to make sure they are doing well and their symptoms have not gotten worse, and to make sure those individuals are isolated. … those individuals are isolated for a period of at least 10 days to make sure they are symptom free … and they can be released from isolation.”
For more information on the Kent County Contact Tracing Volunteer program, visit accesskent.com/health or email pamela.brown@kentcountymi.gov.
